Tucker Carlson: The Boy Who Lost His Leash

Tucker Carlson was always one stern phone call away from the abyss. Then Rupert stopped calling. And now two Americans are dead in Minneapolis.

We know the type — prep school pedigree, inherited money, face frozen in a permanent expression of aggrieved entitlement — who requires, above all else, a daddy. Not a father, mind you. Tucker Carlson’s actual father, the dashing Dick Carlson, was far too busy being a globe-trotting broadcaster and diplomat to provide the guardrails his elder son so desperately needed. No, what Tucker craved was a daddy — that powerful older man who would indulge his provocations while setting firm limits, who would let him play with matches but yank the box away before the house burned down. For seven glorious years, Rupert Murdoch was that daddy. And now? The house is engulfed. Tucker is dancing in the flames. And in Minneapolis, a 37-year-old poet named Renée Good is dead — shot three times by an ICE agent on January 7th, the first homicide recorded in the city in 2026. Seventeen days later, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and VA employee, was shot by Border Patrol agents while filming the chaos on his phone. He had been protesting Renée’s killing. Now he is dead too. This is where the rage goes. This is where it was always going.

The unraveling of Tucker Carlson was always inevitable. What’s remarkable is how quickly the mask didn’t just slip but was gleefully tossed into a bonfire of swastikas. In barely two years since Fox News unceremoniously dumped him — “parted ways,” in the antiseptic corporate parlance — Tucker has sprinted so far to the right he’s lapped the people he used to merely wink at. Nick Fuentes, the baby-faced Nazi who thinks the Holocaust is a baking metaphor? Tucker gave him a two-and-a-half-hour platform and softballs so gentle they might have been delivered on a silver breakfast tray at the Carlyle. Peter Brimelow, the ghoul behind VDARE who has devoted his life to “proving” that brown people are ruining America? Tucker sat across from him and mused, with the affected wonderment of a man discovering a new wine region, that “the defining fact of our lives is that whites around the world are being eliminated.” One wants to be shocked. One is not. Because Tucker Carlson has always been this person. The difference is that someone used to be watching — and more importantly, someone capable of pulling the plug. At Fox, the Murdochs functioned as a kind of superego, that most essential restraint on the id of a man who has never, in his fifty-six years on this planet, been denied anything he wanted. Tucker could play footsie with the “great replacement” theory, could sneer at immigrants and cast George Floyd protesters as “criminal mobs,” could even run interference for Vladimir Putin — but there was always a line, however faint, scratched in the sand by nervous lawyers and the ghost of advertising revenue. The minute that line vanished, so did any pretense of respectability. What we are witnessing is not a transformation. It is a revelation. Tucker without Rupert is a teenager whose parents have left for a European vacation: suddenly the liquor cabinet is open, the credit cards are unsupervised, and all those friends Mother never approved of are streaming through the front door.

Fuentes and Carlson on his podcast PBS.

But here is the thing about teenagers left unsupervised: they don’t just destroy their own houses. They throw parties, and the parties spill into the street, and eventually someone gets hurt. For years — years — Tucker Carlson pumped the “great replacement” theory into millions of American living rooms. Nicholas Confessore’s devastating 2022 New York Timesanalysis found variations of this theme in over 400 episodes of Tucker’s show. The elites are importing voters. The Third World is overwhelming us. They want to replace you. Night after night, the message was delivered with Tucker’s signature cocktail of faux-befuddlement and sneering contempt, and night after night, it landed in the brains of people who were never going to parse the difference between Fox News commentary and a call to arms. Now those people have badges. “Operation Metro Surge,” the Department of Homeland Security called it — the largest immigration enforcement operation in American history, 2,000 federal agents descending on the Twin Cities like an occupying army. The pretext was a viral video from a right-wing YouTuber alleging fraud at Somali daycare centers. The Minnesota Department of Children, Youth and Families investigated and found the allegations baseless. It didn’t matter. The agents came anyway. For six weeks before Renée Good was killed, residents of South Minneapolis described being “terrorized.” ICE agents had already opened fire on people nine times in five states since September 2025. Four people were dead before Good’s Honda Pilot came to a stop on Portland Avenue.

Renée Nicole Macklin Good was a writer, a poet, an English major from Old Dominion. She had a partner and a six-year-old child. She had moved to Minneapolis from Canada, where her family had relocated — and one wonders, now, if that relocation wasn’t an attempt to escape exactly this. On the morning of January 7th, she was driving through her own neighborhood, a few blocks from her home, when ICE agents surrounded her car. The official story — the Kristi Noemstory, delivered with the dead-eyed confidence of a woman who once shot her own dog and bragged about it — is that Good “weaponized” her SUV and tried to run over an agent. The video tells a different story. Good’s steering wheel turns to the right, away from the agent, in the second before he opens fire. Three shots. The first two came 399 milliseconds apart. “Having seen the video myself,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said, “I want to tell everybody directly that is bullshit.” The first homicide of 2026 in Minneapolis was committed by the federal government. And then came Alex Pretti. If Renée Good’s killing was the spark, Pretti’s was the proof that the fire was now policy. He was a nurse — not an activist by trade, but a man who had looked at what happened to Good and decided he couldn’t stay home. On January 24th, he went to a protest. He brought his phone to film and his legal carry permit, because this is America and he had that right. He never drew his weapon. Video from multiple angles, verified by Reuters and the BBC and the Associated Press, shows Pretti with his phone in his right hand and his left hand raised above his head, trying to protect a woman ICE had just pushed to the ground. Six federal agents surrounded him. They pepper-sprayed him. They wrestled him to the ground. One of them removed his gun from his holster — an agent disarmed him — and moved away. And then another agent shot him dead. Secretary Noem’s official statement claimed Pretti “approached” officers with a handgun and “violently resisted” disarmament. Libs of TikTok called him a “lunatic” and an “assassin.” A right-wing influencer with 681,000 followers claimed he was “expecting a firefight.” Conservative podcaster Jesse Kelly sneered that Pretti was “a soldier for the communist revolution” who had “died fighting in a war.” An ICU nurse. A VA employee who spent his days caring for veterans. A lawful gun owner with no criminal record. A son, whose parents are now issuing statements through tears about the “sickening lies” the government is spreading about their dead boy.

The psychology of Tucker Carlson is almost tediously Freudian. Abandoned by his mother at six — Lisa Lombardi simply decamped for bohemian adventure, leaving her two small sons to be raised by their father and, eventually, a Swanson frozen-food heiress stepmother. (One cannot make this up.) He has spoken of this rupture with the performative casualness of a man who has never spent a single hour processing it. “Totally bizarre situation,” he told The New Yorker in 2017, “which I never talk about.” Later, as criticism mounted, the story curdled: Mom was a druggie, a “nutcase,” who gave her children substances and made clear she didn’t love them. Whether any of this is true matters less than what it reveals: Tucker has spent his entire adult life auditioning for approval from powerful men while resenting their authority. He needs the daddy, but he also needs to destroy him. Bill Kristol at The Weekly Standard. The CNN brass who put him in a bow tie. The MSNBC executives who canceled his show after dismal ratings. And finally Rupert, who made him the king of cable news and then, when the Dominion lawsuit made Tucker too expensive to keep, showed him the door without so much as a phone call. That humiliation — being fired not even by the patriarch himself but by the help — seems to have broken something. Or perhaps it simply unlocked the door to the room Tucker always wanted to enter. Because here’s the dirty little secret of Tucker Carlson’s career: the racism, the woman-hating, the authoritarian bootlicking — none of it is new. In those unearthed recordings from the shock-jock show “Bubba the Love Sponge,” made when Tucker was already in his late thirties and early forties, we hear him calling women “cunts” and “pigs,” defending the statutory rape of a child by her teacher, and generally carrying on like a fraternity pledge trying to impress his crueler brothers. That was always in there. Fox didn’t create it; Fox simply monetized it while keeping the most radioactive elements in the lead-lined basement. Now there is no basement. There is only the platform — X, formerly Twitter, where Elon Musk has essentially handed Tucker a key to the asylum and said, “Have at it.” His interview with Peter Brimelow has been viewed more than 21 million times. Musk himself reposted it with the caption “alarming” — not as a warning, mind you, but as an endorsement.

This is the essential thing to understand about Trump 2.0: the guardrails are gone because the people who once manned them have discovered there is more profit in arson. The Heritage Foundation — that once-staid temple of Reagan-era conservatism, the institution that gave us welfare reform and tax cuts — has rallied to Tucker’s defense after the Fuentes interview. Kevin Roberts, its president, called Tucker “a close friend” and declared that Heritage wouldn’t “cancel our own people.” Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell, perhaps smelling the sulfur, issued condemnations — but softly, softly, because one doesn’t want to alienate the base. And what is the base now? It is the people who watch Tucker tell Peter Brimelow that whites are being “eliminated” and nod along. It is the people who see Renée Good’s name and think she had it coming. It is the people who launched a GoFundMe for Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed her, and raised $375,000 — one of the fundraisers explicitly blaming “anti-American traitors like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (who is Jewish)” for “fanning the flames of resistance.” (Note the parenthetical. Note it always.) This is where the rage goes. It goes into chat rooms and podcasts and streaming shows watched by millions. It marinates in replacement theory and white grievance and the certainty that someone is to blame for the fact that America doesn’t feel the way it’s supposed to feel. And then it straps on a badge and goes to Minneapolis, where it fires twelve times at civilians in the space of a few months, killing two of them — both 37, both American citizens, both unarmed in any meaningful sense when the bullets entered their bodies. Chris Madel, a Republican lawyer who had been planning to run for governor of Minnesota, withdrew from the race after Alex Pretti’s killing. He had previously represented Jonathan Ross. “I cannot support the Republican party for what he called retribution,” his statement read. He blamed national Republicans for making it “nearly impossible for a Republican to win a statewide election in Minnesota.” One notes that his objection is strategic rather than moral. One notes that this is the best we’re going to get from that quarter.

Tucker Carlson is fifty-six years old, and no one is watching. The bow tie is long gone. The smirk has curdled into something darker. And every night, on platforms that would have been inconceivable a decade ago, he tells millions of people that the real enemy is not poverty or injustice or climate catastrophe but other Americans — the brown ones, the Jewish ones, the ones who believe that women are people and democracy is worth preserving. He has declared that he hates Christian Zionists “more than anyone else” and calls their beliefs “heresy.” He has given a platform to a man who says the Holocaust was exaggerated. He has sat across from white nationalists and asked them, with the curiosity of a man examining a rare butterfly, to explain why whites are being eliminated. And in Minneapolis, a poet is dead. A nurse is dead. Their families are planning funerals while the federal government calls their loved ones terrorists and the right-wing media machine churns out lies faster than anyone can fact-check them. There is a video of Alex Pretti’s final moments that has been viewed millions of times. In it, you can see him trying to protect a woman who has been pushed to the ground. His phone is in one hand. His other hand is raised. He is pepper-sprayed and swarmed, and then he is dead. His parents released a statement calling the government’s account “sickening lies.” The GoFundMe for his family reached a million dollars in less than 24 hours. At candlelight vigils across the Twin Cities, people who had never met him stood in the cold and wept. A bystander told reporters she hoped everyone could come to an understanding to stop what she described as “terrifying.” Others said they felt “paralyzed” by grief. This is the fruit of the tree Tucker Carlson has been watering for a decade. This is what grows when you tell millions of people, night after night, that their country is being stolen by invaders and that the people who object are traitors and terrorists. This is the end of the story that began with a bow-tied preppy learning to say the unsayable on cable news. Renée Good was a mother. Alex Pretti was a nurse. They were Americans, killed by their own government, in a city that hadn’t recorded a single homicide in 2026 until federal agents arrived. Where else does rage and hate go? It goes exactly here. It always has. The only question now is how many more bodies it will take before the people who could stop this decide they want to. I am not optimistic.

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Josh@thepowellhousepress.com